Another year… another Siggraph. That makes 13 for me, which is really hard to believe. We had a couple of people there from Autodesk that had been to 20 of them!  Man, I'm getting old… but I'm not quite that old :)

It was fun, but honestly Siggraph is just not quite what it used to be back in the day. I remember the days when you were guaranteed to see new and exciting stuff every year.... stuff you’d never seen before and in many cases stuff you’d never quite imagined. The industry was changing so quickly back then. A lot is still happening and things are still progressing, but I guess we've now become a little desensitized to it all. Between the general maturing of the industry, and the fact that most people see technology demos of all the new and exciting stuff on youTube within days of it coming out, I guess Siggraph was bound to lose some of its luster.  Still it was a fun show and I continue to look forward to it every year. Vancouver was definitely a cool host city as an alternative to LA, particularly since there is both a thriving film/effects industry as well as a good sized games industry.  I'm hoping they'll do it there again.

Luckily I’ve gotten to participate in a project here at Autodesk that is rekindling some of those feelings of yesteryear. I presented Project Skyline at Siggraph this year on the main stage of the Autodesk booth. Project Skyline is an authoring to run-time animation system that essentially bridges the proverbial gap in game development between content creators (i.e. animators) and programmers. We first showed it earlier this year at the Game Developer Conference, but we have since added some cool new functionality including a state machine editor, as well as some new Unreal integration.

Keep in mind that this simply a "technology preview".  Skyline is not an actual product and we have made no announcements in that regard.  Note the disclaimer at the begining of the demo movie.

- Project Skyline @ Siggraph -